Clearly, the only reason Rogan even vocalized the N-word in this episode was to encourage his audience to see what was wrong with it: You wouldn’t say this about African Americans, so why is it okay to denigrate Mexicans in the same way? His goal wasn’t to promote racism, but to widen people’s perspective and discourage bigotry. But several years later, that goal came up against the blue stack, whose goal was to censor Rogan for expressing skepticism about federal pandemic policies—and which figured out that the easiest way to achieve its ends was to portray him as perhaps the opposite of what he is in reality: a racist.

Martin Luther King Jr. imagined a future where “as the color differential fades, it will bring with it the racial point of view. Less and less it will be possible to speak with accuracy of Negro newspapers, Negro churches or the Negro vote. More and more, economic, social, and professional status will be more decisive in determining a man’s orientation than the color of his skin.”

The blue stack’s vision is the opposite of King’s. Its goal is not to discard race as the primary means of classifying human beings but to reinforce and magnify it. The Biden administration, the government wing of the blue stack, has adopted a posture of defending racially discriminatory college admissions policies, despite their deep unpopularity with the public. Some stack-aligned state governments like New York are distributing lifesaving COVID treatments based not on medical need but on racial prioritization.